This thread is going way of topic, but I'd really hate to see people being turned away from MySQL as
a DB engine just because of the inaccuracies posted here.
I have several years of experience with many DBMSs, including Informix, Oracle, MS SQLServer,
Postgress, MySQL and several others. MySQL is my favorite for (non-.NET) web applications, because
of its scalability, performance, reliability, low maintenance and ease of use.
There are many DBMSs, each with their own pecularities, and none of them I would consider "bad" (or
even "evil"). Which DBMS to chose for a particular task seems to become a matter of personal taste
more everyday, because the more general offerings, like the ones I mentioned, all provide the same
rich feature set (e.g. transactions, subqueries, stored procedures, outer joins). While I would not
hesitate to recommend in favor of some of the databases I am familiar with, there is not one that i
would ever tell people to "avoid at all cost". Even FoxPro has its uses.
> Sorry, but accepting invalid input without error, truncating overly long
> input and clipping overflowed numbers are not "quirks".
I agree so far.
> They are serious data integrity issues.
I disagree here, because the issues you mentioned are configuration settings in MySQL. You can
change the behaviour of the server in the config file. It is unfortunate that the default settings
are not the ANSI ones. But you can make the MySQL DB comply to the more general standard of issuing
an error on overflow and other forms of invalid input.
I suggest reading some documentation before proceeding on the subject.
> That's fine. At least you aren't really using MySQL in production :-)
I have. On my previous assignment, the customer would loose about $10k per hour in lost machine time
only (not even taking the engineers cost into account) if the MySQL database went offline. It did go
offline once in that three year period i worked there - the power went down, the UPS failed and the
operating system (Solaris) died a horrible dead along with the hard drive. When the power came up, I
had its replacement up and running in about ten minutes, and no data was lost.
--
Mike Looijmans